Seasonal, healthy and delicious vegetarian recipes, with the occasional cake thrown in for good measure!

Orange, Quinoa and Polenta Cake

Why hello June! June is one of my favourite months of the year, not only because my birthday is in June, but also for all of the wonderful food that comes into season and summer warmth. All of the wonderful summer berries, especially raspberries, courgettes, apricots, salads, tomatoes… the list could go on and on.

For my first post in June I thought I would share a cake recipe. This cake is delicious! The only disappointment was that my sister could not eat it. As I have said previously my sister has a lot of allergies and ulcerative colitis which really restricts what she can eat. We were extremely excited when we found a source of quinoa flour that hadn’t been processed alongside buckwheat. We had used this companies quinoa flakes which were great so we’re really hopefully about the flour. However after the first mouthful she knew that she wouldn’t be able to continue eating it. She was so disappointed as it tastes wonderful and we thought we had finally found a flour that she could have! This cake is gluten free but not dairy free as I did use butter but a non dairy spread would work too.

The quinoa flour has a really nice nutty flavour once cooked. Do not be put off when you are making it as it smells quite strong before it is cooked. The polenta adds some nice texture to the cake. I’m not normally a fan of citrus in sweet things but this was great. I used coconut yoghurt in this but dairy yoghurt could also be used to. I really enjoyed cooking with the quinoa flour and I’m looking forward to trying new recipes with it, it is just a shame that my sister won’t be able to eat them too!

Orange, Quinoa and Polenta Cake

Ingredients

100g butter

225g caster sugar

3 eggs

100g quinoa flour

130g polenta

50g ground cashew nuts (or almonds)

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

80g coconut yogurt

2 tbsp runny honey

Juice of half an orange

Zest of 2 oranges

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180C and line an 8 inch cake tin with parchment paper.

Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and mix. Add in the quinoa flour, ground cashews, polenta and bicarbonate of soda and continue to mix.

Add the yogurt, honey, orange juice and zest and mix until everything is incorporated.